Interview: Todd Solondz

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Auteur filmmaker talks Palindromes.

By Todd Gilchrist

For better than ten years, Todd Solondz has been destroying audience expectations as a filmmaker on the fringe of mainstream cinema. After his first film Welcome to the Dollhouse became a critical sensation, Solondz went on to capture some of the most disturbing and indelible portraits of humanity in moviemaking history: Happiness, in which viewers find themselves sympathizing with a pedophile; and in Storytelling, a seemingly 'normal' family slowly disintegrates under the watchful eye of a documentarian.

For his latest effort, Palindromes, Solondz takes a footnote from the pages of avant-garde filmmakers like Luis Bunuel and casts multiple actresses in the central role, Aviva, a teenage girl who possesses an irrepressible desire to become a mother. The director recently sat down with IGN FilmForce to discuss the development of Palindromes' reflective construction, and explains that the structure and content of the project fulfill fantasies he's long held as a filmmaker. "It's probably always been a fantasy of mine to be able to cast multiple actors in a single part," Solondz explains.

"You might be casting a movie and there might be three actors each with a particular quality that you might like, but you wish it could all be one person. In a sense, I get to do that here," he says, describing the purposeful indulgence of his latest cinematic conceit. "It's eight people, but it could have been 80, in the sense that any one of us who were watching the movie could play her in an episode of her life. There is a kind of universality here, that on some emotional level that we can connect to this poor girl's plight."

Solondz says that the essence of his character isn't contained in her palindromic name, but conceived from it. "Certainly for all of the shapes and sizes that we see, the metamorphoses that take place, the character is a constant. She is an innocent, she is unchanging in some sense, but she starts out and she wants to be a mom and her mother says, 'you will always be you,' and then of course there she is at the end of the movie saying, 'now I'm going to be a mom.' That need is still in her, and is somewhat defining of her identity. [In the film] Mark Weiner says, 'it doesn't matter if you gain 50 or lose 50 pounds or have a sex change;' in a sense there is a part of ourselves that is palindromic by nature, that part of ourselves doesn't change."

Ellen Barkin and Hannah Freiman in Palindromes

While he's clarifying his point to a crowded room of confounded journalists, even Solondz momentarily gets lost. "Now I've lost both of my threads," he says, before redirecting. "While Marc Weiner might speak with a certain sense of doom, he's in a grim position himself, but I would say that there's something freeing or liberating about the idea of the inability to change or to live and accept and embrace one's limitations. That can be a good thing."

He adds that the casting of different women &#Array; black and white, young and old &#Array; as Aviva provides for a different development of her character throughout the film, as well as a certain kind of transcendence. "You have a sort of paradox at work, so it's an unchanging and yet ever changing aspect of this body being all of these different shapes and sizes, each of which was doing things in certain different kinds of nuance or color. There's almost a sort of storybook myth, fairy tale-like quality to this that's enhanced by the casting thing, and each one has a different reason." While Solondz didn't devise exactly what his protagonist would look like throughout her travails, he indicates he knew where he wanted to start: "I knew I needed to begin with a black child to set off that something's off &#Array; maybe she's adopted, because Ellen Barkin is the mom &#Array; and at first you're disoriented. But then it kicks in, the connection: okay, it's the same character but different actors are playing this one character."

"I do think an audience will accept all sorts of rules and conventions as long as you stick to them," he continues. "Then you get to the big black woman, [which] for me, that was my Gulliver, so to speak, and the Lilliputians surround her, and then Jennifer Jason Leigh, you look at her face and you see that she's a woman of a certain age, and you can see a certain kind of sorrow etched in that face, and you feel as if that character has lived a whole life and yet of course, she's still thirteen years old."

When the question is raised whether Solondz is attempting to comment on hot-button issues like abortion and teen pregnancy, he contends that he's only trying to generate questions, not provide their answers. "We live in a country where it is such a volatile issue, abortion, that abortionists are murdered or assassinated, clinics are bombed, and nowhere else in the world does this happen," he observes. "It's hard not to be responsive to the fact that it's an 'abortionist' like it's a policeman or a fireman is to take on a heroic profession, that you put your life on the line, you risk your life in ways that if you performed other procedures you could make a good living. You cannot but respect them, regardless of the political convictions that you may have."

Alexander Brickel and Sharon Wilkins in Palindromes

"That said, there was someone captured in Georgia [who killed an abortion doctor] that when he was captured what was interesting was how the community was very sympathetic and stood by him," he continues. "And I wondered what is it that makes someone perfect for such an atrocity as this, because I think it's a profoundly human thing to feel that one at heart is a good person, and I think everyone thinks they're fighting the good fight, even though people may not agree which is the good fight. A man who is murdering abortionists certainly thinks he is saving a million unborn babies, so there is a logic here at work that everybody thinks they're basically a good person."

Solondz says that he finds inspiration from exploring the emotional underpinnings of these conflicts, and wants to encourage his audience to question not only his choices, but their own reactions to them. "I wanted to get into a situation where this young girl who we all feel for, certainly we feel for her plight, her pain, her sorrows and what she's been through, and yet you have this moral horror at her saying 'do it, do it, do it,' that she would pull the trigger, so to speak. That moment on the one hand of feeling for this character, and yet at the same time going oh my God, what are you doing? How can you do this?"

"It's that convergence, that friction of those two impulses that rub against each other that I think is intrinsic of all that I do."

Unsurprisingly, critics have attacked the director for targeting some of our sacred cows as subjects to be scrutinized and even ridiculed. But he insists that his efforts are never intended to serve an exclusively provocative sensibility. "I'm not out to shock, not in any sensationalistic sense. I mean, what subject do you see in any of my movies that isn't on TV any day of the week? I mean, you've got Terry Schiavo stories 24/7 &#Array; what could be more obscene or more grotesque than what's going on in real life? My movies are tame compared to real life, so it's not that it's shocking, it's just that I'm not playing into what an audience is maybe wanting, to be sort of pat on the back and be told that 'you're right, your way of seeing things is the right way.' I'm out to prod and try to force people to question and re-examine the moral consequences, the moral conventions of what some of this means."

That said, Solondz reasserts his basic philosophy as a director, which is to create an aesthetic if not necessarily commercial continuity for his films. "I don't have any grand scheme," he says. "I don't have a plan for my next five movies. I'll be lucky if I can make another one. They kill you, each one, and so I just do one at a time and then I discover myself what I have wrought. Really, the process of filmmaking is very much a process of discovery; it's a mystery. What is it that makes one put pen to paper? I've been writing for some meaning, and it is a mystery to me."

"It's certainly not fun," he continues, "so [I question] what is it that pulls me to pursue this story, and sometimes I find myself not choosing the story, but the story choosing me. I may have ideas that may be much more marketable, let's say, but I get compelled &#Array; the hand has a life of its own &#Array; to pursue certain kinds of stories, and I just have to be true to that impulse."